While
we are living in this world, work is or ought to be the moral
foundation for economic well being. The apostle Paul bluntly
declared: “If a man will not work, neither will he eat.”

A
problem arises, however, when there is a persistent imbalance
between the number of jobs and the number of people available
to take them.
Today it is alleged that five people are in line for each available
job. The national unemployment rate stands at 9.8 percent; and
many others have dropped out of the work force, have
become retired, or
take odd jobs now and then. Many young people who have graduated
from college have moved back with their parents, unable to finance
independent living.

Our
social policy today is not to let unemployed people starve but
give them some money even if they do not work. The Democrats
pushed
for extended unemployment benefits in the compromise tax package.
Is this the best we can do? Yes, we have relieved some people’s
immediate suffering, but there were other suffering people who
did not qualify for the benefits. Is welfare the best we can
do?

No,
the better way is to get serious about long-term employment problems
and fix what is broken. Sad to say, it will take government
to fix
the problems since they will not be fixed on their own. Specifically,
it will take federal legislation. That is the plain truth.

What
needs to be fixed? The first problem is unemployment due to automation.
Over the course of many years, the introduction
of
technology and better business methods has improved the efficiency
of labor,
meaning that more can be produced with fewer people. In technical
terms, (labor) productivity has increased. There has been
a steady improvement in productivity over the years with the
result that
people once employed in certain industries have lost their
jobs. Labor has
been displaced to areas of less productive enterprise such
as gambling, crime and punishment, wars, lawsuits, medicine,
and
financial management.

The
second problem is that American workers are now competing with
people in developing countries who will work for a fraction
of
the wage that Americans require. What business manager
would want to
pay an American factory worker $15 an hour when a worker
in south China will do the same kind of work for $.50 an
hour?
Our system
of “free trade” lets production escape to low-wage
countries while the goods are sold in the high-wage United
States. We cannot
compete on that basis, even if currency rates are substantially
adjusted. The United States runs large, persistent trade
deficits with east
Asian countries, with no end in sight.

There
is a way to deal with the type of unemployment due to automation:
Reduce the hours of work. During the 19th
Century,
labor unions
in America and Europe pushed for an eight-hour work day.
The two-day weekend (five-day week) was introduced in
the
1920s
and 1930s,
again
with labor support. But now the trade-union movement
in the United States has effectively collapsed; or, at least,
it
is no longer
focused on hours reductions. Big business is focused
on
short-term financial
results. That leaves mainly government that could bring
about shorter work hours.

With
respect to competition from low-wage areas, protective tariffs
could be a cost equalizer.
That was U.S. policy
from the beginning
of our nation through the years of the Great Depression.
We prospered when trade was not “free”.
However, the United States is now bound by a web
of trade agreements
that would be difficult
to break. It will take many years of international
discussion to create a new trading order that protects
our nation
from the extreme
disparities in wages and living standards around
the world. We should let other nations advance economically
without allowing ours to collapse.

proposal
for a shorter workweek

The
best, most achievable option at this time is to shorten work
hours through federal legislation. Specifically, the Fair Labor
Standards Act of 1938 needs to be amended to suit the conditions
of our time. An appropriate goal would be to seek a 4-day, 32-hour
workweek to replace the 40-hour workweek that we have now.

Two
changes to this law, in particular, need to be made: First,
the standard workweek - the point at which overtime begins -
should be
changed in the statute from forty hours to thirty-two hours. Second,
the overtime premium for weekly hours worked beyond the standard
should not be paid to the overtime worker; it should be taxed away.
The employer should be penalized for scheduling work beyond the
standard hours, but the employee should not be rewarded. The
purpose of the
law is to reduce the level of hours so more people can work, not
create a wage windfall for long-hours workers.

The
reality is, of course, that we find ourselves in a recession
- one which
may not be as temporary as recessions in the past.
Some employers, especially governments, have used employee furloughs
to
bring their budgets back into balance. The general approach is
called “work
sharing”. Workers are forced to reduce hours with a corresponding
cut in pay.

The
amendment proposed above would not force employers or employees
to do anything; it would merely create a financial
incentive
for employers to schedule thirty-two hours of work a week without
creating
an incentive for employees to do otherwise. If people are worried
about the long-term impact of shorter hours on wages and economic
growth, a possible solution would be to amend the Fair Labor
Standards Act on a temporary or provisional basis. Put the
changes into effect
immediately and keep them so long as the national unemployment
rate exceeds 6 percent. If it drops below that percentage,
we could go
back to the forty hour week.

Despite
the conventional wisdom, however, shorter work hours are usually
accompanied by wage increases
if implemented over
the long
term. Economist Paul Douglas of the University of Chicago,
later a U.S. Senator, did the definitive study of U.S. wages
and hours
between 1890 and 1926, when changes were actually taking
place. He found a positive correlation between wages and reduced
hours.
Today,
however, academic economists, having no experience of actual
conditions, tell us that such results are “fallacious”.

Not
so in east Asia where work hours are continuing to come down
even their economies grow at a rapid pace. The
Japanese
government
made a commitment to bring down hours in the late 1980s
and has kept its promise. China eliminated weekend work in 1995
and has
since
become an economic powerhouse. At the present time, South
Korea is in the process of consolidating its forty-hour
week.

The
U.S. shorter workweek movement was derailed at the start of the
Great Depression. The U.S. Senate actually
passed
a 30-hour workweek
bill in April, 1933, but Congressional insiders such
as Leon Keyserling
(an aide to Sen. Robert Wagner of New York) marshaled
opposition within the incoming Roosevelt administration. These
people
did not want Americans to become addicted to leisure.
They wanted
to keep
the great money-making machine intact to finance whatever
projects government wished to pursue. The main project
turned out to
be war.

As
a result, government turned to deficit spending to revive the
economy rather than reduced hours. The
idea
was advanced
that the
pursuit of leisure was defeatist. Instead, we needed
to pursue economic growth (in financial rather than
real terms).
A
mile stone in that
campaign was the National Security Council’s
position paper adopted in 1950, NSC-68, which proposed
increased
military spending
as a stimulus program. The military budget would be
quadrupled, producing a “growth dividend.”

A
man who actually knew what the military was about,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, opposed that approach. He called
it “inflationary”. Candidate
Eisenhower said in 1952: “There is in certain
quarters the view that national prosperity depends
on the production of armaments
and that any reduction in arms output might bring
on another recession. Does this mean, then that the
continued
failure of our foreign policy
is the only way to pay for the failure of our fiscal
policy?” Upon
leaving office, President Eisenhower warned of the
dangers of a “military-industrial
complex”.

Yet,
we have continued on the course of increased government spending,
higher and
higher deficits,
and more vigorous
military engagement
around the world. Do we need to keep the “growth” bubble
inflating in this way or is there a better alternative?

the
choice for Christians

So
much for the economic and political considerations surrounding
our policies of work and leisure. What are the religious implications?

Some
pundits would have us believe that American “greatness” has
been achieved by adherence to a “work ethic” and that
this ethic was instilled through Protestant Christianity. Such
connections were established in Max Weber’s influential book, “Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, published in 1904. The
basic idea was the Protestants were driven to work hard and accumulate
money as a sign that they were among God’s elect. The more
they devoted themselves to materialistic pursuits, the more righteous
they believed themselves to be. They were “driven” to
make more and more money.

The
choice for Christians today is whether to follow Weber, a German
sociologist, or to follow Jesus,
who was not in favor of accumulating
material possessions. Although Jesus made no statements on public
policy, he did express a general attitude toward leisure and
work. He said:

“
No servant can be the slave of two masters; for either he will hate
the first and love the second, or he will be devoted to the
first and think nothing of the second. You cannot serve God
and Money.
Therefore I bid you put away anxious thoughts about food and
drink to keep you alive, and clothes to cover your body. Surely
life is
more than food, the body more than clothes. Look at the birds
of the air; they do not sow and reap and store in barns, yet
your heavenly
Father feeds them. You are worth more than the birds! ... Consider
how the lilies grow in the fields; they do not work, they do
not spin; and yet, I tell you, even Solomon in all his splendor
was not
attired like one of these ... No, do not ask anxiously, ‘What
are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?’ All
these are things for the heathen to run after, not for you.” (Matthew
6: 24-32)

One
can reasonably infer that Jesus would not have condemned working
people who sought more leisure as “lazy” or
lacking a “work
ethic”. Jesus and the early Christians would not have
approved growing military budgets to maintain and increase
employment; they
were pacifists, not pillars of political empire. No, if anything,
Jesus would have wanted people to spend more time worshiping
God. He correctly characterized the decision that people
had to make: “You
cannot serve (both) God and Money.”

Today,
it is the empires of money and the people in charge of them who
want to keep Americans working long hours so
they will
be earners
of wages and payers of taxes, hopefully on an ever increasing
scale. And because Wall Street controls Congress and the
President, that
is our national policy as well. We must keep GDP growing
to paper over our past spending excesses, bring in increased
tax
revenue,
and finance a series of wars. The interests of Money, not
God, are here being served.

Remember
that the Jewish Sabbath was the first “shorter workweek”,
so to speak. God through Moses drew the line between
the hours of the week devoted to religious worship and to secular
pursuits. The
spirit of that decision was not to restrict leisure to
one day of the week but to make sure that activities of the
other
six days would
not to expanded to seven and encroach upon that which
belonged to God.

The
proposal here is, for economic reasons, to draw a new
line between the two domains. Four days would be devoted
to work,
and three to
leisure (which is free time available for activities
that the relieved worker would choose). These could be three
days to
worship God
more completely, or three days to eat pizza and watch
television.
The
new challenge would be to encourage people with more
free time to spend that time in the right way. Predictably,
such decisions
would
be better made by working people themselves than by the
government.